Why Women Couldn’t Wear Pants on the Senate Floor Until 1993

One brisk morning in early 1993, Carol Moseley-Braun selected a favorite pantsuit from her closet and went off to her new job in Washington, D.C. The Democrat, who had previously served in the Illinois state Senate for a decade, had been elected in November 1992 on a platform of women's rights and civil rights. When she won, she replaced incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Dixon and became the first African-American woman to serve as a United States senator. But when she set foot on the Senate floor that winter day, wearing "my nice outfit," as she said later, "the gasps were audible." Unbeknownst to Moseley-Braun—who had donned pantsuits frequently during her time in the Illinois legislature—women were forbidden from wearing pants on the Senate floor.

She had broken a rule, albeit an unwritten one. It was enforced by peer pressure and official Senate doorkeepers who could turn away anyone they didn't think looked "appropriate," and it remained an important fact of daily life among women in the Senate for decades. That is, until Moseley-Braun and another political pioneer intervened to challenge it.

Like other gentlemen of their day, early senators wore waistcoats, frock coats, and breeches with stockings—nothing too fancy, since ostentatious clothing had a whiff of aristocracy about it. But by the late 19th century, senators were dressing in formal clothes, complete with vests, cutaway coats, and striped trousers. Fashion was generally consistent despite some regional differences, and experienced senators policed newer members, ensuring they were dressed to preserve the dignity of the legislative chamber.

When women first began entering Congress—starting when Jeannette Rankin was elected to the House of Representatives in 1916—they dressed in dark colors and conservative cuts to avoid drawing attention to themselves. In the 1940s, once women began serving in the House in larger numbers, Reps. Mary Norton (a Democrat from New Jersey) and Frances Bolton (a Republican from Ohio) would patrol the fashion choices of other female representatives. The historian for the House of Representatives, Matthew Wasniewski, told The Hill in 2011 that "If [congresswomen] were wearing a dress that Norton considered too frilly, she would go up and say something to them."

Trousers became common leisurewear for women by the mid-20th century, but it took a while longer before women wore pants to the office or on formal occasions. Slacks and pantsuits only began entering the mainstream of acceptable workwear for women around 1970, when they were first allowed at federal agencies, including the State Department and the Pentagon—though they were still forbidden at the FBI until after J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972; he hated seeing women in pants.

That year, Pat Nixon wore two pantsuits by American designers in a fashion spread, becoming the first sitting first lady to be photographed publicly wearing trousers. Around the same time, fashion norms started to change in the House of Representatives: Rep. Charlotte T. Reid, a Republican from Illinois, made history in 1969 when she showed up to the House in a "black wool, bell-bottomed pantsuit … a first in the annals of the U.S. Congress." One male colleague couldn’t believe it, remarking to Reid, "I was told there was a lady here in trousers, so I had to come over and see for myself."

In the Senate, norms were harder to change. As the upper house in the U.S. legislature, the Senate has always been more formal and reserved than the House. Even during the 1980s, pants on women were apparently too much for that august chamber to handle. Individual Senate offices had their own rules, but on the floor, women wearing pants were verboten, which could necessitate quick changes. "We've heard from women staff that in the 1980s, if they came in to work—if they were called in on an emergency basis—they needed to keep a dress to put on quickly or they had to borrow one if they had to appear on the Senate floor," Richard A. Baker, Senate historian from 1975 to 2009, told The Washington Post in 2002.

While the dress code for the Senate was never officially codified, the norms were enforced by Senate doorkeepers, who controlled access to the chamber and served partly as security guards, partly as protocol monitors. Even today, they assess each person seeking entry, making sure they are supposed to be there and are dressed appropriately. The problem is that "dressed appropriately" has historically been up to the discretion of the doorkeeper on duty: Doorkeepers made determinations based on personal opinion or instructions from their boss, the sergeant at arms.

In 1972, a group of female Senate aides wrote a letter to the chairman of the rules committee, complaining that each doorkeeper had his own fashion requirements and asking that a written dress code be developed so they’d know when their outfits were acceptable. "It's just so silly," one aide told the Los Angeles Times. “You just don’t have the time to second-guess the sergeant-at-arms at 8 in the morning when you’re trying to get dressed.” The rules committee apparently ignored their request.

In 1993, the gender balance in the Senate finally started to shift. Until that year, only two women senators had ever served simultaneously. But in November 1992, four women won Senate seats, joining Nancy Kassebaum (a Republican from Kansas first elected in 1978) and Barbara Mikulski (a Democrat from Maryland first elected in 1986) for a total of six women—the largest-yet group of female legislators in the upper house.

One of those new senators was Moseley-Braun. During her years in the Illinois state legislature, she’d grown accustomed to wearing pantsuits, and when she joined the U.S. Senate, she was unaware they weren’t allowed. "It was one of those unwritten rules that they don’t tell you about unless you're part of the circle," she said recently in an interview with WBEZ. "And nobody was talking to me about these things, so I had no clue."

On that winter day in 1993, after hearing the gasps from the men in chamber, Moseley-Braun recalled that she'd wondered, "'What’s up? What’s the problem?' It’s not like I had on a kilt." The senator didn't realize what she'd done until female staffers came up to thank her. They'd been fighting for the right to wear pants for years, and now they had a senator on their side.

Actually, they had two. Around the time Moseley-Braun was inadvertently bucking the no-pantsuit rule, Sen. Barbara Mikulski had made up her mind to challenge the same outdated norm. "It was a snowy day" sometime in early 1993, she told Vice, "and I found out more bad weather was coming. I just really wanted to be comfortable. I'm most comfortable wearing slacks."

Unlike Moseley-Braun, Mikulski knew she was breaking a long-standing tradition, so she approached fellow Democrat Robert Byrd, then the President pro tempore of the Senate, to advise him of her plans to wear pants. Byrd had the Senate parliamentarian, Alan Frumin, check the rules to make sure pants on women weren’t explicitly outlawed. When he determined that they weren't, Byrd "gave the nod," Mikulski remembered. "He didn't say yes, but he gave a nod." Soon Mikulski was walking onto the Senate floor in a pair of slacks, and from the reaction, she recalled, "You would have thought that I was walking on the moon." (While there are no official Senate records showing which woman wore pants on the Senate floor first, newspaper accounts suggest Mikulski's act followed Moseley-Braun's.)

The pants-wearing senators had set a precedent—one that would soon become permanent. The Senate sergeant at arms that year was Martha Pope, the first-ever woman to hold the job (she had been elected two years prior). According to the Chicago Sun-Times, her doorkeepers followed a written policy manual that stated, "Women are required to wear business attire, i.e., dress, skirt and blouse or business suit." After Moseley-Braun and Mikulski wore pantsuits on the floor, Pope circulated a memo to her staff, amending the manual to read, "Women are required to wear business attire, i.e. dress, skirt/blouse, business suit, coordinated pantsuit (slacks and matching blazer; no stirrup pants)."

Sen. Barbara Mikulsk on her way to the Senate floor in 2014. Image credit: Getty Images

Senator Diane Feinstein joined her colleagues in wearing pantsuits from time to time, and female staffers and journalists took advantage of this new freedom as well. Female Senate aides also had a new line of argument for pantsuit-averse supervisors. According to Moseley-Braun, "What happened next was that other people started wearing pants. All the women staffers went to their bosses and said, 'If this senator can wear pants, then why can't I?' And so it was the pantsuit revolution."

Additional Sources: "Women Aides Are Upset: Fashion Furor in the Capital," Los Angeles Times; "Women Now Can Wear the Pants in the Senate," Chicago Sun-Times

5 Facts About Edgar Allan Poe on His 210th Birthday

You’ve read Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying stories. You can quote "The Raven." But how well do you know the writer’s quirky sense of humor and code-cracking abilities? Let’s take a look at a few things you might not know about the acclaimed author, who was born 210 years ago today.

1. He was the original balloon boy.

You probably remember 2009’s infamous “Balloon Boy” hoax. Turns out the Heene family that perpetrated that fraud weren’t even being entirely original in their attempt at attention-grabbing. They were actually cribbing from Poe.

In 1844 Poe cooked up a similar aviation hoax in the pages of the New York Sun. The horror master cranked out a phony news item describing how a Mr. Monck Mason had flown a balloon flying machine called Victoria from England to Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina in just 75 hours. According to Poe’s story, the balloon had also hauled seven passengers across the ocean.

No balloonist had ever crossed the Atlantic before, so this story quickly became a huge deal. Complete transatlantic travel in just three days? How exciting! Readers actually queued up outside the Sun’s headquarters to get their mitts on a copy of the day’s historic paper.

Poe’s report on the balloon was chock full of technical details. He devoted a whole paragraph to explaining how the balloon was filled with coal gas rather than “the more expensive and inconvenient hydrogen.” He listed the balloon’s equipment, which included “cordage, barometers, telescopes, barrels containing provision for a fortnight, water-casks, cloaks, carpet-bags, and various other indispensable matters, including a coffee-warmer, contrived for warming coffee by means of slack-lime, so as to dispense altogether with fire, if it should be judged prudent to do so.” He also included hundreds of words of excerpts from the passengers’ journals.

The only catch to Poe’s story was that it was entirely fictitious. The Sun’s editors quickly wised up to Poe’s hoax, and two days later they posted an understated retraction that noted, “We are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous.”

2. He dabbled in cryptography.

If you’ve read Poe’s story “The Gold-Bug,” you probably know that he had a working knowledge of cryptography. But you might not know that Poe was actually a pretty darn good cryptographer in his own right.

Poe’s first notable code-cracking began in 1839. He sent out a call for readers of his Philadelphia newspaper to send him encoded messages that he could decipher. Poe would then puzzle over the secret messages for hours. He published the results of his work in a wildly popular recurring feature. Poe also liked to toss his own codes out there to keep readers busy. Some of the codes were so difficult that Poe professed utter amazement when even a single reader would crack them.

Poe was so confident in his abilities as a cryptographer that he approached the Tyler administration in 1841 with an offer to work as a government code cracker. He modestly promised, “Nothing intelligible can be written which, with time, I cannot decipher.” Apparently there weren’t any openings for him, though.

3. The "Allan" came later.

It would sound odd to just say “Edgar Poe,” but the famous “Allan” wasn’t originally part of the writer’s name. Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809 to professional actors, but his early childhood was fairly rotten. When Poe was just two years old, his father abandoned the family—leaving the toddler's mother, Elizabeth, to raise Edgar and his two siblings. Not long after that, Elizabeth died of tuberculosis.

Poe actually had a little luck at that point. John and Frances Allan, a well-to-do Richmond family, took the boy in and provided for his education. Although the Allans never formally adopted Poe, he added their surname to his own name.

Like a lot of Poe’s fiction, his story with the Allans didn't have a particularly happy ending. Poe and John Allan grew increasingly distant during the boy’s teenage years, and after Poe left for the University of Virginia, he and Allan became estranged. (Apparently the root of these problems involved Poe’s tendency to gamble away whatever money Allan sent him to subsidize his studies.)

4. He had a nemesis.

Like a lot of writers, Poe had a rival. His was the poet, critic, and editor Rufus Griswold. Although Griswold had included Poe’s work in his 1842 anthology The Poets and Poetry of America, Poe held an extremely low opinion of Griswold’s intellect and literary integrity. Poe published an essay blasting Griswold’s selections for the anthology, and their rivalry began.

Things really heated up when Griswold succeeded Poe as the editor of Graham’s Magazine at a higher salary than Poe had been pulling in. Poe began publicly lambasting Griswold’s motivations; he even went so far as to claim that Griswold was something of a literary homer who puffed up New England poets.

Poe might have had a point about Griswold’s critical eye, but Griswold had the good fortune to outlive Poe. After Poe died, Griswold penned a mean-spirited obituary in which he stated that the writer’s death “will startle many, but few will be grieved by it” and generally portrayed Poe as an unhinged maniac.

Slamming a guy in his obituary is pretty low, but Griswold was just getting warmed up. He convinced Poe’s aunt, Maria Clemm, to make him Poe’s literary executor. Griswold then published a biography of Poe that made him out to be a drug-addled drunk, all while keeping the profits from a posthumous edition of Poe’s work.

5. His death was a mystery worth of his writing.

In 1849 Poe left New York for a visit to Richmond, but he never made it that far south. Instead, Poe turned up in front of a Baltimore bar deliriously raving and wearing clothes that didn’t fit. Passersby rushed Poe to the hospital, but he died a few days later without being able to explain what happened to him.

Poe’s rumored causes of death were “cerebral inflammation” and “congestion of the brain,” which were polite euphemisms for alcohol poisoning. Modern scholars don’t totally buy this explanation, though. The characterization of Poe as a raging drunk mostly comes from Griswold’s posthumous smear campaign, and his incoherent state of mind may have been the result of rabies or syphilis.

Some Poe fans subscribe to a more sinister theory about the writer’s death, though. They think he may have fallen victim to “cooping,” a sordid 19th century political practice. Gangs of political thugs would round up homeless or weak men and hold them captive in a safe place called a “coop” right before a major election. On election day—and there was an election in Baltimore on October 3, 1849, the day Poe was found—the gangs would then drug or beat the hostages before taking them around to vote at multiple polling places.

This story sounds like something straight out of Poe’s own writing, but it might actually be true. Poe’s crummy physical state and delirium would be consistent with a victim of cooping, and the ill-fitting clothes jibe with gangs’ practice of making their hostages change clothes so they could cast multiple votes. With no real evidence either way, though, Poe’s death remains one of literature’s most fascinating mysteries.

The $13,000 Epiphany That Made Orville Redenbacher a National Popcorn King

Happy National Popcorn Day! While you’re no doubt celebrating with a bowl of freshly popped, liberally buttered popcorn, here’s something else to digest: Orville Redenbacher originally called his product Red-Bow.

In 1951, Redenbacher and his partner, a fellow Purdue grad named Charlie Bowman, purchased the George F. Chester and Son seed corn plant in Boone Township, Indiana. Though Redenbacher’s background was in agronomy and plant genetics, he had dabbled in popcorn, and was friendly with the Chester family.

Eventually, Carl Hartman was brought in to experiment. In 1969, when the trio had developed a seed they felt really confident in, they went to market. They dubbed the product “Red-Bow,” a nod to “Redenbacher” and “Bowman.”

The product was a hit regionally, but by 1970, Bowman and Redenbacher were ready for a national audience and hired a Chicago advertising agency to advise them on branding strategy. At their first meeting, Redenbacher talked about popcorn for three hours. “Come back next week and we’ll have something for you,” he was told afterward.

The following week, he turned to the agency and was told that “Orville Redenbacher’s” was the perfect name for the fledgling popcorn brand. “Golly, no,” he said. “Redenbacher is such a ... funny name.” That was the point, they told him, and they must have made a convincing case for it, because Orville Redenbacher is the brand we know today—and the man himself is still a well-known spokesman more than 20 years after his death.

Still, Redenbacher wasn’t sure that the $13,000 fee the agency had charged was money well spent. “I drove back to Indiana wryly thinking we had paid $13,000 for someone to come up with the same name my mother had come up with when I was born,” Redenbacher later wrote.

Hungry for more Redenbacher? Take a look at the inventor at work in the vintage commercial below.